Connecticut losing the gutsiest leader in child welfare

By Richard Wexler

Dec 06, 2018 | 6:00 AM

Joette Katz is Commissioner of the state Department of Children and Families. (Brad Horrigan / Hartford Courant)

Over the past 30 years, the number of people in the United States who have run agencies such as Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families is in the thousands. (In 13 states, individual counties run these agencies; that helps account for the number.)

How many left their agencies, and the children they serve, in better condition than when they arrived? A generous estimate is 14.

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It’s not just that the job is probably the hardest in state or local government — although it is. It’s also a job that requires the courage to make tough, unpopular decisions, and it needs political leaders willing to back you up. That doesn’t happen often.

But it happened in Connecticut when Joette Katz agreed to leave a much easier, more secure job — Supreme Court justice — to run the DCF for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

Within months, it was clear things were going to be different. After a child “known to the system” died, there was no mass scapegoating of front-line workers, no hiding behind confidentiality, and no foster-care panic — a sharp sudden rise in children needlessly removed from their homes and put into foster care by workers terrified of having the next high-profile tragedy on their caseload.

“I think in the past that’s been exactly the mistake, frankly,” Katz said at the time. “A child dies and the next thing you know, workers are getting thrown under the bus, and 500 children get removed [from their homes] the next day because it’s a reaction to a tragedy. I think that’s the exact wrong way to behave.”

That’s why, at the time, I called Katz the gutsiest leader in child welfare. Gov. Malloy proved to be America’s gutsiest political leader on child welfare issues. Connecticut’s children gained enormously from it.

While foster care increased in other states, it decreased in Connecticut. That means thousands of children were spared the enormous trauma of needless separation from their families. They were spared the rotten outcomes of foster care, which are so poor that in typical cases research shows even comparably maltreated children typically fare better when left in their own homes.

The worst form of care, institutionalization, was drastically curbed, and the least harmful, placing children with their own extended families, increased.

Through it all, there was no compromise of child safety. The standard federal government measure of child safety, the proportion of children maltreated again within six months of a previous incident, never exceeded the rate before Katz took over. In most years, it was lower. Even the group that calls itself Children’s Rights — a group that has fought DCF in the courts for decades and is no friend of family preservation — has praised Katz and never claimed the reforms compromised safety.

So while Katz’s decisions have been called “risky,” they were only risky for her and for Gov. Malloy. They were actually the safer choice for children.

Tragically, children known-to-the-system continued to die, just as they did when Connecticut was tearing apart far more families and institutionalizing far more children. The idea that no child known-to-the-system should ever die is the most noble and valid of goals — and the most absurd of standards. We don’t demand that police chiefs resign because they don’t eliminate all crime, we praise them for reducing crime and curbing needless incarceration. Child welfare leaders should be judged by the same standard.

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Yes, Katz failed in some areas, and not just those that have gotten widespread attention. She never came to grips with the problem of parents having to surrender custody of their children to get them mental health care. And I devoted an entire mini-website to condemning her handling of a part of one notorious case, the case of “Baby Dylan,” that never got enough attention — the needless termination of his mother’s parental rights.

Child welfare systems rarely see a continuum of strong leadership. Over the last three decades, only Florida had two good leaders in a row, and the next one retreated from reform.

So unless Gov.-elect Ned Lamont is incredibly astute, incredibly courageous and incredibly lucky, a lot of people who called for Joette Katz’s resignation are likely to regret it, and a lot of Connecticut children are likely to suffer for it.

Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, www.nccpr.org